Benjamin Young Prime, physician and writer of patriotic verse, was born Benjamin Youngs Prime (he later dropped the s from his middle name) at Huntington, Long Island, the son of Experience Youngs Prime and Ebenezer Prime, a Congregational minister. After graduating in 1751 from the College of New Jersey, then located at Newark, he studied medicine until 1756, when he returned to serve as a tutor at the college, which had moved to Princeton. He left Princeton after one year and returned to Long Island, where, over the next five years, he lived at various times in East Hampton and Huntington while practicing medicine and writing poetry. Yale University awarded Prime an honorary master's degree in 1760, matching the one he had received from the College of New Jersey in 1754.

Prime left for London in 1762 to continue his medical studies. While there he published his first volume of verse, The Patriot...